


Default Affinity

by Chromat1cs



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: "TiNG", Alcohol, Asexual Relationship, Banter, Canon Compliant, First Kiss, I love reading them as ace don't @ me, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, True Love, appropriate interjections by Beethoven, obliviousness reigns, the Moron4Moron is out full-force here fam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 12:52:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19296133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: “You can stay at my place, if you like?”“I—I don’t think my side would like that.”“...You don’t have a side anymore. Neither of us do. We’re on our own side.”Being that the end of the world has just been avoided and there remains one more prophecy left to unwind, Crowley figures he can throw some caution to the wind and invite his oldest friend back to his flat to do some problem solving.





	Default Affinity

**Author's Note:**

> [megaphone screech] THEY CANONICALLY WENT BACK TO CROWLEY’S FLAT SO IN THE SPIRIT OF EAGERLY MAKING STUFF UP I’M GONNA MAKE THEM SMOOCH.
> 
> The final episode is a blessing upon our collective imagination. Here’s some of my thoughts to sweeten the pot.

By and large, Crowley enjoys busses.

The routes are just efficient enough to keep people using them regularly which means, while it doesn’t cause as much trouble when a bus route bungles itself as when it happens on the tube, when the busses inevitably break down or get caught in traffic, there’s a lot of blaspheming and grumbling and general virulent grouchiness caused by people using them. But for all the ways Crowley enjoys benefiting from public transportation woes, he hasn’t really taken a bus since acquiring the Bentley (better stop thinking about how much he might have to start nowadays lest he start choking up in public— _ Rest in pieces, old friend _ ). Busses were very different things in the 1920s.

“No stopping cable,” Crowley mutters at Aziraphale, “I suppose they mindread where everyone gets off now?”

Aziraphale looks at him, pulling himself back from distantly watching Tadfield and the unspooling village road furling behind them through the window as they go, and crinkles his nose at Crowley. His eyebrows bunch pleasantly as he points at the bright yellow handle next to him. “Don’t be silly, they’ve got buttons.”

Crowley squints at the little red circle. “They’ve figured out how to have conversations with computers, but they still have to tell a bus where to drop them?”

“Apparently. Uriel has always been very proud of those computers,” Aziraphale sighs, sounding slightly bitter and more than a little exhausted. Crowley watches him mildly for a moment, a titch more than plainly curious. He can tell it bothers Aziraphale to talk about matters of Above-And-Below right now, and Crowley can’t blame him. Coming nose-to-nose with the apocalypse, seeing fucking Satan himself wriggle up from beneath the tarmac, has shaken even Crowley’s patience for bureaucracy, and  _ he’s  _ the one who knew what to expect. He can hardly imagine what sort of shuddering discomfort Aziraphale has likely been keeping down for the past several hours. Crowley has seen the sort of pristine bullshit woven into Heaven’s eaves every time he’s popped upstairs to bother Aziraphale in the midst of doing paperwork to distract himself from his own, and while it’s plenty bleak in its own way it comes nowhere near the grim and brimstone of seeing evil incarnate burst up out of the ground. Crowley touches Aziraphale’s arm.

“Would you rather find somewhere in Soho instead, or…?”

Aziraphale looks over at him, not quite starting but letting open surprise pass across his face for a moment. He seems to correct it with a dry little smile, the sort he always gives Crowley when Crowley knows he’s suggesting something a little bit reckless or more than slightly against the grain of Aziraphale’s higher instincts, and leans so slightly into Crowley’s touch that Crowley might be imagining things. “I would assume you’ve already miracled our friend up there to head to Mayfair though, haven’t you?” Aziraphale nods his chin at the driver. Crowley balks a little and shrugs.

“I could reroute him.”

“Oh, no, that would be petty. And I think Mayfair is just fine, thank you.”

Crowley decides not to take offense at Aziraphale calling his penchant for using miracles on very small things  _ petty, _ even though that’s exactly what it is. He leans back into his chair, one leg straightening lazily into the aisle, and hopes somebody takes a very minor and only slightly inconveniencing trip over his foot—the kind that will make them mutter something crude under their breath, not the kind that would chip a tooth.

He leaves his hand on Aziraphale’s arm. Neither of them comment on it.

The bus clears of regular passengers after some time and trundles on toward the un-divinely inconspicuous curb just outside the entrance to Crowley’s flat, where both he and Aziraphale disembark with their own little farewells to a very confused-looking busdriver. The building itself is perfectly unobtrusive if not a bit too modern for one’s own good, in which the only other residents are sinfully wealthy and rarely leave the place anyways, so the absence of visitors who can’t just pop on up occasionally by way of holy influence (or infernal, despite Crowley’s insistence he not be bothered off the clock) goes largely unnoticed. Here amid the insufferable types who look down their nose at anyone not wearing designer or, quite frankly, anyone under the age of about 45, Crowley feels perfectly and warmly at home.

Aziraphale lingers on the sidewalk for a moment with his hands in his pockets after the bus growls away into the thin threads of after-midnight traffic on this block. Crowley doesn’t press him, merely watches, nerves bunching and un-bunching inconveniently between his lungs, until Aziraphale straightens one lapel and looks at Crowley. “Have you any wine?”

Crowley scoffs. “Have I any  _ wine. _ ” Relief suffuses him for some reason, which he pays no mind as he throws an arm about Aziraphale’s shoulders and turns them toward the front door. “It’s no back-of-your-bookshop, angel, but trust me, I’ve got wine.”

The vintage, when he finds himself in the walk-in cellar beside the unused refrigerator several minutes later squinting at the first bottle he grabs, is somewhere from among the 1890s.

“Cheers,” Crowley announces after pouring two very deep glasses of a red dark enough to pass for deoxygenated blood, sauntering into the sitting room, “to neither of us getting discorporated or letting the Big One roll in.” He hands a glass to Aziraphale, who has seated himself carefully on the corner of Crowley’s cube-shaped sofa. Crowley raises an eyebrow at him. “I promise it honestly is a sofa, you know, you can relax a bit. Won’t bite.”

Aziraphale blinks distractedly at Crowley, looking up at him in a vague middle-distance as he sips from his glass. He makes a small sound of appreciation around it and nods to himself. “Oh, this is lovely, what is it?”

“Some chianti or another from the Crispi era.” Crowley shrugs. “Took a case during the tariff wars, nobody missed it.” Azriaphale glowers at him a little, and Crowley gestures at his own glass. “And now we get to enjoy it! Don’t guilt me after helping you save the bloody universe, angel, drink.”

Looking as though he’s going to insist something else, Azirphale decides against it and takes another slow sip. Crowley tries not to watch him, but he feels assuaged when Aziraphale scoots backwards and finally leans back as best as one can on a sofa made more for display than any sort of comfort.  _ Good. _ Aziraphale could do with some unwinding these days, it’s been far too long since he and Crowley have had a chance to get obliterated together. Although that means things haven’t gone awry in far too long either, save for the recent shit-meet-fan situation just narrowly avoided. Crowley sits back into one of his angular armchairs and drinks as well. 

One of them has unwittingly miracled a soft album of Beethoven sonatas onto Crowley’s stereo, he realizes after several long minutes of quiet as they both sink into decompression so badly needed. It may have been Aziraphale for the bare fact that he always had a soft spot for the angry little man, but it also may have been Crowley for the even barer fact that he knows all of Aziraphale’s favorites without really being aware of them.  _ Default affinity,  _ Crowley has thought to himself sometimes when he’s been left alone for longer than he pleases. And how strange that they would be from opposite sides of the same coin? They should have always hated one another, the last several days have made that painfully obvious. And what happens if—

They both look up at the same time. “The last prophecy,” Aziraphale blurts, just as Crowley growls, “One more fucking prophecy though.”

Let it never be said that Anthony J. Crowley isn’t consistent. 

Aziraphale looks defeated. “ _ When all is said and all is done, ye must choose your faces wisely, for soon enough ye will be playing with fire,” _ he quotes gently before sighing. “I so badly wanted to just be done with it all, didn’t you?”

Crowley makes a brooding sound around the rim of his glass. “Agreed. What does she mean ‘faces,’ like cards? Playing cards? Are we going to challenge someone to a fatal bout of rummy?”

“I’m no good at rummy,” Aziraphale grumbles. Crowley snorts.

“You could be if you let yourself cheat every once in a while.”

“Well suppose it  _ isn’t _ rummy, what then?” Aziraphale raises his eyebrows testily, veering the subject away from any questionable morality, and sipping with expectant neatness from his glass.

Crowley rolls his eyes. “Poker, Blackjack, I don’t know, 52-card pickup! Could be anything, all I know is you might have to cheat a bit. ‘Choose your faces wisely,’ like cards and also like sides, eh?” He points at Aziraphale, proud of the poetics, and spreads his fingers in a wordless  _ How About That? _ motion. Aziraphale looks doubtful.

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“You just don’t want to hide any aces in your sleeves. What happened to those magic tricks of yours then?”

Aziraphale glowers at Crowley. “Well if it isn’t cards, it could be coins. Or, I don’t know, buildings.” He sips from his wine again, and winnows one hand through the air with a flustered little scowl. “Or plates.”

Crowley squints. “Plates?”

“I don’t know!” Aziraphale cries again, a flush rising on his cheeks—whether from embarrassment or a wine blush, Crowley can’t tell; all he knows is that it’s terribly, dangerously endearing. “If my ideas are so ridiculous, why don’t  _ you  _ try?”

Leaning back in his chair a bit further, idly swirling his drink, Crowley looks out the broad, floor-to-ceiling window that spews in a nighttime view worth at least half the rent here at which he might balk if demons had any need to worry about accounting. “Say it at me again?”

“ _ When all is said and all is done,” _ Aziraphale repeats carefully, _ “ye must choose your faces wisely, for soon enough ye will be playing with fire,” _

“Fire.” Crowley takes a wide swallow of wine, peering unseeing at the smallish, southeastern glare of the London Eye cutting into the moody-low lighting of the flat. “Why would that be an issue? Fire does nothing to me.” Aziraphale looks offended when Crowley glances over at him. “What?”

“It  _ very _ much does things to me, chief among them cleansing me from existence.” Aziraphale shuffles his shoulders back into the sofa with a haughty little twitch, seeming determined to make it more comfortable, and takes another sip of wine. “Besides, Agnes tends to write in figures of speech. ‘Playing with fire’ here most likely doesn’t mean  _ actual _ fire, it’s a device that—”

“I know what a figure of speech is, angel,” Crowley drawls. “It probably means we’ll have our boots in the fire, la-di-da, as our respective heads of office grill us within an inch of our lives over the technicalities of dropping the ball.”

The Waldstein sonata starts up on the stereo, and Aziraphale glances at it with an instinctive little flicker of pleasure behind his eyes. Crowley’s thoughts derail for a moment, remembering a particular summer in 1804 in which he trailed Aziraphale to no less than twelve performances of this particular piece—tromping all across Vienna and beyond in a sort of two-person caravan for the tune that Crowley has always thought captures Aziraphale’s general energy better than nearly anything else he can think of. It’s just the right amount of chaotic loveliness packed in around a genuine sweetness that digs into the marrow just so, and Crowley almost forgets to stop himself from smiling just a bit at the thoughts when Aziraphale looks over at him.

“We stopped the apocalypse, Crowley, I hardly think that can count as dropping the ball.”

Crowley rolls his eyes, belatedly remembering to remove his glasses in the safety of his own flat. He rubs at his eyelids with thumb and forefinger before depositing his glasses somewhere he’ll likely forget in the morning and just end up conjuring another pair as he always does after any sort of bender. He gestures at the breadth of the flat with his half-empty wine glass. “Of course not, to us! But our bosses? Do you think  _ Gabriel _ is glad we denied Heaven their holy war? You saw Beelzebub’s stupid face on the airbase, I’m fucking toast next they get their hands on me!” He tosses back the whole of his wine in one go and stands, into the kitchen with a vaguely serpentine need to move just now to grab the bottle on its own. When he sits again, and heavily, it’s on the other end of the couch beside Aziraphale. “Our gal Agatha is dead-on, I’m afraid,” Crowley spits. “We’re playing with bloody fire.”

He can feel Aziraphale looking at him with a mix of worry and nervous awe as Crowley takes a long pull of drink directly from the mouth of the bottle as they had been back on the bus stop bench. The night glares in through the window, threatening with the passage of time, and the music slows into a softer second movement. Crowley feels himself deflate marginally, sighing into the air with the bleak tolerance of Come What May sitting heavily in his chest. He stopped time not a few hours ago, he could probably do it again—but for how long? And what sort of world is really worth living in if it’s all just  _ paused? _

“There must be something in the prophecy we’re missing,” Aziraphale says gently. Crowley looks sideways at him, holding in a smirk when Aziraphale polishes off his own last couple gulps of wine in one go-down as well. “What?”

Crowley bites down his back to teeth to keep from snickering to himself. “Nothing.” He holds the bottle out to Aziraphale, half-expecting him to turn it down with a prim little refusal, but to Crowley’s delight Aziraphale takes the bottle and nips his own sip straight from it with the air of one not to be outdone.

“I keep getting caught on the bit about faces,” he says, unwittingly matching the cadence of the music picking up in fervor here and there. Aziraphale sits forward, his elbows to his knees, and furrows his eyebrows in close thought, staring at nothing in particular on the floor. Crowley absorbs the sight, backlit by all the London lights streaming through his window, and thinks not for the first time in the last couple hundred years that he’s fairly mad for him after all.

“Don’t you mean plates?’ Crowley can’t help but tease, letting his grin split freely this time when Aziraphale narrows those sharp, blue eyes at him.

“Very funny. No, it’s the fact of  _ choosing _ that has me stopped.”

“How so?”

Aziraphale slugs back another draught of wine with such casual irreverence that Crowley’s heart leaps into his throat without warning; his chest tightens with a violent mix of discomfort and very much comfort indeed, and he clenches his fingers around the corner of the ivory-colored pillow nearest his hand to keep from bursting out of his own skin with the sensation of it all. “It makes it seem as though we have a direct role to play in whatever it is, doesn’t it?” Aziraphale asks, clearly on one of his tangents in which he’s talking out his own thoughts and does  _ not  _ want Crowley to interrupt by actually answering the questions (Crowley, ever abysmal with rhetoricals, for once knows how to shut up). “‘Faces’ indicates there’s more than one of something we could pick, but amongst what are we picking? If we were to, say,  _ gamble _ with some sort of outcome, cards would make sense. But then there’s the element of fire, which should have nothing to do with a fair game of cards on a good day, but—”

“Gambling,” Crowley blurts. Aziraphale looks up at him pointedly, as though yanked out of introspection he hadn’t just voiced to the entire flat—even Crowley’s plants seem to be leaning nearer to hear it and give their own two cents. Crowley stands up slowly, his mind churning.  _ Gambling, games, betting, chance, life _ —“I suspect we’ll be put on trial, won’t we?”

Aziraphale looks taken by surprise, if only for the fact he hadn’t let himself think about that reality in the hours since stopping Armageddon. “I suppose we will.”

Crowley’s stomach pulls, his thoughts cantering ahead of him almost too quickly to catch. “Alright, and that’s when they’ll be putting our feet to the fire. Proverbial, of course, yeah?”

“Yes, but— _ oh.” _ Aziraphale’s eyes widen slowly, and he snatches another quick sip from the wine bottle as though it’s the source of his dawning thoughts.  _ Shit, _ Crowley wants to give him the world on a platter. “In heaven, it—the fire is literal up there.”

_ “What?” _ Crowley’s jaw drops. “You’ve got  _ fire in heaven?” _

Aziraphale winces as though Crowley has punched him in the arm. “Don’t be silly, it isn’t a permanent fixture. It’s only there, one tidy column of it, when an angel is on trial for doing something awful.”

Crowley’s guts turn. “But fire kills angels. For good.”

Nodding with a tight jaw, Aziraphale sits back up to hunker into the sofa once more. “Yes, it does.”

It takes a moment for the logic to line up past the foggy scrim of comfortable inebriation beginning to wash over Crowley from the beautifully potent tinge of the wine, and even then he has to squint out the window as though focusing a lens on it. “Are you telling me that Gabriel and the rest of those saintly fucks are going to  _ burn you into the aether _ for saving humanity from collapsing in on itself?”

Aziraphale’s expression cools slightly, the muscles in his face tightening with general resignation. “In not so many words, yes.”

Crowly hisses, low and sharp and furious. “Not on my fucking watch.”

He should be surprised, really, by the strength of his conviction, but there’s something unique about adoring someone for nearly six-thousand years that really puts a damper on the whole What Do You  _ Mean _ I Care? act. He gave it up in earnest somewhere around the Enlightenment and has just been pretending, if he’s honest (and he’s not, he’s got things to do such as lie and cheat and loophole his way out of bloody fucking  _ everything) _ ever since.

But Armageddon has come and passed, and Crowley supposes he can drop at least one charade in the whole juggling act that is his identity.

“What do you presume we do then,” Aziraphale says, not sounding entirely confident in the matter as he runs one finger around the dimpled base of the wine bottle, “crash the whole operation, ‘Sorry, Gabriel, Michael, any others present, we don’t think today or really any day is a good day for a trial, ta then, see you never’?”

His hand has tightened around the neck of the bottle, white-knuckled, and Crowley moves to sit down again beside him, just a bit closer than before, to take the wine from Aziraphale with a gentle pull. Crowley drinks, long and indulgently, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand when he’s cleared half the bottle. “Yeah, I was thinking so.”

Aziraphale withers a bit. “Almighty. What I wouldn’t do for some of your moxie.”

“Who says things like ‘moxie’ anymore?” Crowley teases him, nudging his shin genially with one foot. Aziraphale scowls.

“Apologies if I’m a bit behind the times, Crowley, there’s been a lot on my mind for the past couple  _ hundred years.” _

Crowley sees a flitting dash of true woundedness pass over Aziraphale’s expression, and he offers the wine across the small space between them as his heart pulls with unsaid apology. Aziraphale refuses it once with a weak glare before buckling, taking it with a sheepish frown and several quiet gulps of frankly impressive intent.

“A couple hundred years is a long time to dwell on things on your own, you know,” Crowley hums as he raises his eyebrows to see Aziraphale matching him pound-for-pound with tolerance. Maybe it’s the wine, maybe it’s a belatedly-dawning sense of giddy survivor’s euphoria, but Crowley feels the compulsion to get very selfishly close to Aziraphale in this moment. He radiates a sort of soft warmth, the kind you don’t get from something that isn’t holy as a church on Easter, by which Crowley should feel absolutely defiled but somehow  _ wants. _ He supposes, as he stares for about two seconds too long at the shapes of Aziraphale’s fingers plucking idly at the arm of the sofa, that’s due to his beginnings a bit higher up than Hell.

It’s only ever been Aziraphale. It’s  _ always _ been Aziraphale.

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale says softly, pulling Crowley back into the present and back to watching Aziraphale’s face, all worried lines and sullen demission, “I’m sure you understand that some things are better kept to oneself, so—”

Something, for some blessed reason, clicks in that moment with a mighty, chucking  _ CLANK _ in Crowley’s mind.

“Ourselves!” He crows. Aziraphale flinches, looking at him in bewilderment. Crowley gestures frantically between them, his hand flapping like a reanimated dove. “Us, you, me, we  _ switch!” _

“We what?”

“What do you think they use for trial-by-proverbial-fire in Hell, Aziraphale?” 

Crowley waits patiently for all of six seconds. 

Aziraphale screws up his eyebrows. “I c—”

_ “Holy water!”  _ Crowley shouts, throwing his arms out to the side. “Think about it, angel, who between us is immune to either holy water or fire?”

“You to fire, me to water, but we—” Aziraphale stops himself, shock dawning on his face. “Oh, Crowley, that’s brilliant. You’re  _ brilliant, _ how did—‘Choose your faces wisely,’ _ literally  _ our faces! Crowley, you’re a genius!”

Crowley swells with pride as he feels his pupils dilate out, unbidden, wide and comfortable to absorb the praise. He leans sideways into the sofa, propping his cheek on his hand. “I have one or two good ideas every so often, don’t I?”

“It will take some effort to uphold a switch, but I think we can do it,” Aziraphale knatters on, holding the near-emptied wine bottle in two fussy hands as he schemes (imagine that, an angel,  _ scheming— _ Crowley is elated). “Oh, I think we’ve spent enough time around one another that we could keep up a good charade for long enough, don’t you?”

A dry look takes over Crowley’s expression. “I do hope so, angel,” he says suddenly with the perfect mix of haughty obliviousness, the cadence of Aziraphale’s speech pattern dead-on if not strange in Crowley’s voice, “I would have to think you dense for not picking up some mannerisms over several millennia.”

Aziraphale narrows his eyes at Crowley, pursing his lips. “Very  _ funny, _ Crowley,” he drawls, the ooze of Crowley’s own slower patter unexpectedly accurate, “you think I don’t pay attention to you? What bloody else is there to do besides pay attention to you half the time?”

Crowley laughs as a triple-dose of mild embarrassment, overflowing adoration, and pleasant surprise dive into his veins. Back to his own voice, his sighs and casts an impressed look at Aziraphale. “Touché.” Ignoring the way his heart is flexing sweetly to see the mirrored joy in Aziraphale’s own little smile, Crowley pulls a bittersweet expression. “When do you think they’ll try and nab us back to the trenches then?”

Tipping back what looks like the last of the wine bottle, Aziraphale makes a glum sound to himself. “Probably as early as tomorrow, at least for Heaven. Gabriel sticks to his  _ to-do lists.” _ Something about the way the spits the last two words makes Crowley’s brain short out pleasantly for the barely-covered fury rumbling beneath them.

Aziraphale holds the empty bottle out to Crowley then, who almost makes a quip about dealing with Aziraphale’s rubbish until he realizes there are a few sips left for him. Wordlessly, Crowley raises his eyebrows and sketches a lazy toast at Aziraphale. Aziraphale beams; Crowley’s stomach wrenches nicely, and he drinks down the sharp tannins of wine with a grateful thirst.

“Probably the same for me, too. Hell can’t resist a good execution, after all,” Crowley says, finally thunking the empty bottle down on the chic coffee table across from the sofa.

“So do you think we should switch in the morning? Early bird and all?”

“What, early bird gets the serpent?”

“I thought it was ‘worm.’” Aziraphale is frowning a good-natured frown, the kind with a smile hidden underneath it with very little subtlety, and Crowley feels himself start melting even faster than he has been lately.

“Depends on who you ask, really,” Crowley says around a yawn, stretching both his arms wide across the back of the couch. One of them is very close to Aziraphale’s shoulders, but Crowley can’t find it in him to bother moving it—some iteration of himself from around the mid-1700s is shrieking at the back of his mind about propriety and the general dangers of tempting an angel,  _ this _ angel, but he finds that it’s very easy to ignore internal strife with the help of 200-year-old wine. “Yeah, we should switch in the morning.”

Aziraphale laughs a little to himself, and Crowley feels as though he’s mooning a bit when they look at one another. Fuck it, he doesn’t care. “What if I’m right, like I was when I found you in the pub?”

“About us having to both ‘get a wiggle on’?” Crowley croons, knowing he’s being a shit at this point but if Aziraphale isn’t used it that by this point than he hasn’t been doing his job correctly, has he?

_ “No,” _ Aziraphale insists, snorting, as crisply as he can now clearly sinking into the comfy sort of insobriety that Crowley has always liked best himself, “the bit about us exploding if we inhabit the other’s body.”

Crowley tips his head back and frowns at the ceiling. “Body’s a body, I suppose. Even if we explode, we could find somewhere else to set up shop. I think It’s our best option any way you slice it.”

The sofa shifts, and Crowley looks down to see Aziraphale hunkering into a cozy lean against the weirdly-low back of it that he may or may not have miracled to be more amenable to comfort. His eyes are closed and he’s smiling a calm smile, and Crowley feels the old vestiges of his abandoned holiness shudder in his chest as they never have before.  _ Shit, shit, shit,  _ what does he do with any of this, it—

“I’d imagine,” Aziraphale says airily, solace heavy in his softened voice, “Alpha centauri is probably lovely this time of year.”

The moments in his lifetime as a supernatural troublemaker in which Crowley has felt his purpose shift so intently have been few and far between, but they’ve certainly been there: his fall, the apple, Aziraphale—Heaven and harmony, that’s what it all boils down to. Everything that’s ever been worth any amount of satisfaction or happiness in this great simmering pot of humanity stumbling through time has started, continued, and ended with Aziraphale.

“Angel.”

Crowley is moving before he even knows what he aims to do, Aziraphale’s eyes opening with a sweet flicker of recognition when Crowley scoots forward. Crowley’s hand is on Aziraphale’s shoulder and he’s nearer than he’s been in a while, nearing the breadth in which their noses almost touch as it did when he was fit to deck the lovely bastard at the convent for calling him good,  _ good, _ how can anyone call Crowley  _ good? _ But here he is, half of the duo that helped bungle and then prevent the end of the world, bad plus good equals—“What?” Aziraphale breathes, his eyes flicking between Crowley’s face and his hand in several rapid shutters.

Crowley nervously licks his lips. He slips his hand up to cradle the side of Aziraphale’s face and his hair is soft, soft as Crowley has maybe almost let himself imagine it was for a very long time, to draw a very slow thumb across the height of Aziraphale’s cheek. “Angel,” Crowley repeats, his voice nearly breaking on the second syllable, hoping it conveys every ounce of feeling he can’t put into words because it might sear his forked fucking tongue if he actually says them aloud.  _ Please hear me, _ he begs with his eyes, pupils wide as black opals,  _ I’m not supposed to feel this but I think I— _

Aziraphale sits up, just a bit, and covers Crowley’s hand with his own. He blinks quickly and, in one gut-churning moment, Crowley thinks briefly that Aziraphale might push him back with a polite little rebuff that Crowley would accept and swallow like a pouch of holy water, keep it in and weather the pain of existing on the same plane as Aziraphale while not being able to feel whole with him, which would be more than fine if it’s what Aziraphale needs, Christ, Crowley would throw himself on a bed of swords if it meant that Aziraphale would feel comfortable and happy and— _ did he just think ‘Christ’?! _

“Crowley,” Aziraphale murmurs, pulling Crowley’s attention back to the present and away from the shocking new twists of Crowley’s brand of blasphemy. His hand is still on Crowley’s, his index finger tracing a careful pattern along the back of Crowley’s wrist, and Crowley focuses on the feeling of it just in case his spirit feels like racketing out of his body and into the air instead. “We very well might trade some errant thoughts and feelings when we make the switch tomorrow, so...well, I suppose if you’ve anything to say you’d better out and say it now, eh?”

Aziraphale clearly means for it to lighten the moment just a bit, but Crowley only feels the pressure to bare his truths compound on his heart. He grimaces. Both of them flounder for a moment, gazes glancing everywhere in a bid to think of what to say next, hands still clasped close against Aziraphale’s cheek. Crowley tightens his jaw. “I don’t know what will happen if I say it,” he whispers.

“Say what?”

Crowley hisses to himself.  _ “It, _ angel. Come on, you’re a smart one, figure it out. It’s easier than speaking Hebrew, that’s for sure.”

“Oh, Hebrew isn’t  _ that  _ hard, it’s only—”

“We aren’t getting into that right now, we’re discussing  _ this,” _ Crowley interrupts him bodily, teeth gritted, putting his free hand to Aziraphale’s arm as though steadying himself. “This, whatever it is I  _ can’t bloody say  _ but I’m sure you can divine with just a moment of thought.”

Aziraphale doesn’t look uncomfortable, but he still doesn’t seem to get it. “There are a large number of things you can’t say, Crowley, and almost all of them have to with matters of Heaven that have no place in our current conversation.”

Crowley lets out a low, frustrated sigh and bunts his forehead forward to rest against Aziraphale’s in exasperation. “What are you  _ made of, _ Aziraphale,” he deadpans. Aziraphale looks pensive for a moment, his eyes impossible clear and holy-blue from so close; it should burn Crowley’s own stare to ashes, but all it does is make his heart pick up a couple ticks.

“Sacred matter and holy light,” Aziraphale says matter-of-factly.

“And…?”

Aziraphale squints. Crowley wants to kiss the corners of his eyes, oh, Crowley wants to kiss every part of that confused and lovely face. “Blessed purpose?”

_ “And.” _ Crowley’s fingers flex instinctively as apprehension mounts in him, pushing his pulse up to a gallop. Aziraphale responds, almost unwittingly, by moving the hand not resting atop Crowely’s to fiddle lightly with one of Crowely’s errant shirt lapels.

“And I suppose love, but I—” Aziraphale stops, a small breath leaving him in a little wheeze. “Oh.”

“Please say it for me, actually, truly say it, before I implode,” Crowley blurts quickly, shutting his eyes briefly against all the strange and rampant anxiety he’s never known he could feel before now. Aziraphale clears his throat, the Beethoven continues on behind them, and Crowley wants for a basin of holy water in which to douse himself and escape all of these awful, beautiful,  _ human-y _ feelings at once.

“Do you really mean that?” Aziraphale asks gently, his voice calm and careful behind the dark of Crowley’s eyelids.

“Yes, I think I’m honestly going to implode into ashes if you don’t—”

“No, Crowley, do you love me?”

_ Bless it all. _ Crowley eases his eyes open and lets all of the frustrated madness of the past several days expel itself in one heavy sigh that growls a bit on its tail end. “Do you think I would have done  _ half _ of what I did over the last several hundred years if I didn’t?” He looks up into Aziraphale’s eyes, depthless as a summer sky and doubly as bright, and feels a few of his barbed edges soften. “We were only supposed to come up with a plan tonight, you know. This wasn’t supposed to come out into the open.”

Aziraphale tips his head slightly to the side, the picture of comfortable curiosity. “Well now it has,” he murmurs before repeating very carefully; “Do you love me, Crowley?”

Crowley swallows, and it feels as though a minor eternity passes in the time between drawing one short breath and giving Aziraphale a fateful little nod.

“More than anything.”

Aziraphale wraps his fingers around Crowley’s hand there on his cheek and looks as though he’s holding in a very small smile. “More than the  _ Bentley?” _

Crowley hisses and grips Aziraphale’s hand right back. “Don’t push your luck.”

They move toward one another then as though pulled by some unseen force, a sort of magnetic adoration that Crowley has always felt under his surface and never quite acknowledged as anything besides a murky annoyance— _ Default affinity, _ Crowley thinks once to himself, nodding at the thought like a passing train, and before he knows it he’s kissing Aziraphale for the very first time.

Warmth suffuses Crowley so suddenly that he thinks for a moment he’s truly combusting from the inside out, but he realizes it’s too soft to be infernal fire. It’s a sensation that starts in his belly, jets up to his heart, and spreads from there to every edge of his limbs and his hair and the place where their lips meet is absolutely  _ searing _ with goodness—human-adjacent bodies are, he decides in the instant, more dangerous and awesome than a fussy nuclear reactor. He tightens his hands against Aziraphale’s cheek and the soft tweed of his jacket, reveling in the warmth and closeness and the unflagging feeling of  _ home  _ diving into every one of his senses.  _ This. _ This is what Crowley left behind when he fell.

How lucky is he to find it again after six-thousand-odd years?

Their mouths move softly against one another for several slow, indolent passes before Aziraphale is the first to pull back. Crowley chases his lips with a little twitch and a gasping sort of puff of air as Aziraphale gives him a thrilled little chuckle at that. “You could have given me some sign of it, you know,” Aziraphale suggests.

“What,” Crowley mutters against the corner of Aziraphale’s mouth, eager to kiss him again and again until the night expires and they have to face the unknown grip of fate sometime soon, “should I have made a sign and waved it around at you, ‘You Know That Feeling I Shouldn’t Recognize, Well Hello There, I Feel It A Lot And Often’?”

Azriaphale chuckles, a slightly manic sound with very little air behind it at all. “A lot and often?”

“Every day since I figured out what the strange  _ leaping  _ in my chest was doing each time we found one another,” Crowley admits in a cobbled rush. Aziraphale’s gaze melts. Crowley grins.

“Poetics are  _ my bag,” _ Aziraphale says roughly, and then they’re both leaning in again to dive into the safety and hilarity and utter perfect return of kissing one another, soft and slow, under the watch of nighttime and a very wide swath of very green plants on a sofa that really shouldn’t be half as comfortable as they’ve both accidentally miracled it.  
  
When the sun rises, they’ll figure something out with regards to switching identities, etcetera, etcetera. But for now, they have thousands of years of confusion and anguish and lots and lots of lingering thoughts to sort out in the language of careful, searching kisses — and they’ll be damned (or blessed, or what have you any longer) if anything gets in the way of that.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Feel free to drop by and say hi on [Tumblr](https://chromat1cs.tumblr.com/) and/or [Dreamwidth](https://chromat1cs.dreamwidth.org/) <3


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